[3.7] SC/HC - ED/Blight Trickster - Up to 10k eHP, Layered Defense, 3m DPS

I am leaning towards Trickster for HC play after having thoroughly tested Occultist in BHC. Sure, Occultist blows Trickster out of the water on those long boss fights (by a whooping 20-30% DPS!), but trickster is just so smooth for general mapping.

I have finally landed on Scion for my league starter ED character as I am going to play on SC and deepeeesssss is my one and only goal.

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Nedieth wrote:

I am leaning towards Trickster for HC play after having thoroughly tested Occultist in BHC. Sure, Occultist blows Trickster out of the water on those long boss fights (by a whooping 20-30% DPS!), but trickster is just so smooth for general mapping.

I have finally landed on Scion for my league starter ED character as I am going to play on SC and deepeeesssss is my one and only goal.

What does a scion ED look like?

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Nedieth wrote:

I am leaning towards Trickster for HC play after having thoroughly tested Occultist in BHC. Sure, Occultist blows Trickster out of the water on those long boss fights (by a whooping 20-30% DPS!), but trickster is just so smooth for general mapping.

I have finally landed on Scion for my league starter ED character as I am going to play on SC and deepeeesssss is my one and only goal.

Yep was wondering about that as well tbh. Btw Got to lvl 100 in BreachSC with Trickster variant some time ago

So ye Occultist, 20% more dps via chaos pen, and that free curse... ye, my Deodre' damning been irking me so much, both for res capping, and for getting more dmg on other gear slots (ring/shield).

iirc at end spec'd out of massive curse radius (which is a must imo for mapping), and spec'd into more dmg. Was at 13k ES, 48k unbuffed DoT. Could push it to 55k maybe with better shield/jewels, but that's about it.
Occultist def. for guardians, shapers, uber atziri. Trickster for mapping.

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAABAJuhotkzh8gUieC00fnoAx70-PfXu02nK4-mIvQdvgPu4q3v66EvGyUfQQ5IS661SHzlSVFVrvVvlS6-ir0nf8aX9EV-GFby0qEiqJpYB7DYkzqTHwhn3V94LzsNKPqbXREPES-TJ0SrdZ4xNQnZ34rEog-rGGrw1WwL3ZLyl6br6QKQ1iycgscZilxAgwkOXL6AGDzmWEyzwzpn_D1fp5uP-sF837AHHoTFykYrCpeVe8OCELfWFr9SU13ydoJcilxr2VuHy2qMavpiWjW5bRlSr3vXEZabtRFQsZANfMNtlyGsmEkTr-vQH4RIzxXfmKJAAdHbWSSLLKZXyZcGyAw3g-tje24h0C2o

This is the tree I set up for Scion. No ZO, so relies on Sorrow of the Divine to regen from ED.

Now that I finally decided what to play, I went ahead and changed ascendancy on my Occultist to Necromancer. If you have insane gear and are limited only by movement speed and/or cast speed, Necro is the way to go for sure. Uploading a recording where I play my Necro for you to check out. Lots of stupid plays since I haven't played ED with that many spells to use before, but you get the idea. If played perfectly, Necro should be the highest DPS ED character, but I am close to ruling it out for my part due to being both squishy and extremely technical to play (there are not enough keybinds, or sockets for that matter).

Adding video when it's done.

EDIT: Necromancer ED!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcuRj-S2wM0

I was playing around with an Occultist build here in Path of Building for 2.6 and I was really struck by how little value I felt like I was getting out of Consuming Dark. I mean yeah it poisoned and that was some big DPS, but I wondered if I could get it some other way.

I'm running hybrid and didn't really want to give up a rare chest for Cospri, so I tried removing the Empower link and replacing it with Poison and then using a rare decay wand. Overall I've improved my DPS by 30k that way (Path of Building calculates the decay DPS at 25k).

I really just wish you could dual wield a wand and a dagger without using glitches. Though I'm not sure I'd want to give up my energy shield shield, which is worth about 1k ES.

Poison is really bad at lower gear/gem levels. When you go all out to scale poison damage and have full 21/20 gem setups, you want poison over decay again. I have played around with path of building a bit the past few days, and on normal bosses I manage to get up to 7m DPS on my necromancer setup under ideal conditions. Decay is good for early/mid part of end game. Once you start looking at high/ultra end game, poison is the name of the game yet again. Just keep in mind that it is the ED tooltip DoT that counts for 90% of the clearing we do. Boss DPS is not alpha omega.

You could use an Essence of Delirium on a Sai or sceptre instead of a wand for some easy dual wield action. Personally, I would have gone for a Cospri's and a shield if I were to invest in a hybrid character again.

My point was that this was at good gear. I was still poisoning, but just using the poison support gem instead of Consuming Dark. It's probably better DPS to ditch the shield for a sai and wield a consuming dark, but with a shield I'm getting that the poison gem is the way to go.

oh, yeah. In terms of single target, swapping out the sixth link for poison will probably be better most of the time. I would never recommend that, since it does decrease our AoE DPS quite a bit. Eventually the DPS increase you get from decay isn't worth it any more, and you should just focus on further increasing poison double dipping with an offhand like breath of the council or the scourge (which will also help on AoE)

Then again you have the guardians that completely screw up that logic.

Hey,

thanks for your guide, I will go with it as a league starter. I somehow can't manage to properly load the tree after conversion to CI.

I tried the Online Planner, Offline Planner and Path of Building.
Can you point me at what i am doing wrong?

I will be doing CI occultist because for some reason I dont like scion. You posted tree for occultist few pages ago, does it need some updates or its good to go? Im not sure about gem links, do you think scion will be similar so I can look your character?

And should I aim for decay weapon if my main goal is uber atziri and later shaper?